David Altman

Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach

InthewakeoftheColdWar,democracyhasgainedthestatusofamantra.Yetthereisnoconsensusabouthowtoconceptualizeand measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argueforanewapproachtoconceptualizationandmeasurement.Wefirstreviewsomeoftheweaknessesamongtraditionalapproaches. Wethenlayoutourapproach,whichmaybecharacterizedas historical, multidimensional, disaggregated,and transparent.Weendby reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.

Assessing the Quality of Democracy: Freedom, Competitiveness and Participation in Eighteen Latin American Countries

This article explores the problem of conceptualising and measuring the quality of democracy in Latin America. The first part discusses the use of the concept and the need for an operational measure. It explores three dimensions of the quality of democracy: civil rights, participation and effective competition. The second part develops an indicator of effective competition, one of the key dimensions of the concept. The third part analyses the empirical relationship between all three dimensions in 18 Latin American countries between 1978 and 1996. The study constructs summary measures of the quality of democracy in several ways, and show that the ranking of the cases is highly consistent no matter the procedure applied. The final section tests the validity of the measure and discusses its limitations.

Direct Democracy Worldwide

Direct Democracy Worldwide addresses the relationship between direct and representative democracy and uncovers the specific conditions under which both can coexist in a mutually reinforcing way. It demonstrates that direct democracy is Janus-faced: Some mechanisms of direct democracy look forward in an attempt to democratize politics whereas others look backward, enhancing the power of politicians who deliberately use them. From this latter perspective, instead of giving power to the people, other times it subjects the people to the powerful. Direct Democracy Worldwide fills a lacuna in our understanding on the uses of mechanisms of direct democracy in the contemporary world, paying special attention to how direct and representative democracies interact under different institutional circumstances. This book reevaluates how citizens acquire power to abide by public decisions and whether they have the right to take part equally and fairly in the entire process that generates these decisions, which naturally fall beyond national elections and the twelve or thirteen times we exercise sovereignty in our lives. It does not debase the importance of free and fair elections – to the contrary. Free and fair elections are a sine qua non constitutive element of democracy, and without them everything collapses. However, the time elapsed between elections may be agonizingly long for citizens whose preferences are systematically unheard, and these interelection spaces constitute the weakest link of current democracies. They tend to be left aside as an empty space filled with horizontal – but not vertical – accountability in a manner that eliminates the most important component of the first polyarchy transformation (Dahl 1989). Any constitutive part of democracy, such as freedom of expression, is expected to be fulfilled at any time and indefinitely in the future. This must hold true for popular sovereignty as well – and it should not be limited to just one day every few years. Thus, this book attempts to revitalize something that is intrinsically one of the backbones and leitmotivs of the democratic tradition: popular sovereignty as a way of addressing the demands of citizens and the dependence of public policies on their preferences. The question is: How can

Redibujando el mapa electoral chileno: incidencia de factores socioeconómicos y género en las urnas

This article studies the change of cleavages in the post–authoritarian Chile using electoral and socioeconomic evidence that goes beyond presidential elections and public opinion polls. This research allows us to determine that the socioeconomic conditions (measured through the index of human development) have the expected effects on the percentage of votes obtained by each of the two major coalitions of the country (the governing Concertacion, and the opposition Alianza). In general terms, the Concertacion obtains better results in the communes with greater values of the index of human development and the Alianza in communes with lower levels of human development. Nonetheless, if we considered the curvilinear effects, the Alianza perform better in communes with extreme values of IDH and the Concertacion in the communes with average values. In other words, the Concertacion presents a distribution with a shape similar to an inversed U (∩), and the Alianza otherwise (∪). With respect to the vote of women we can affirm that, although they still tend to favor parties of the Alianza, women simultaneously tend to vote more to the women than to the men. Therefore, we can observe gender solidarity at the polls.

La institucionalización de la ciencia política en Chile y América Latina: una mirada desde el sur

Resumen Esta introduccion no pretende ser mas que una primera aproximacion sobre el estado del arte de la ciencia politica en el continente. Aqui se argumenta que el reforzamiento institucional de la ciencia politica latinoamericana debe pasar por la construccion de instituciones universitarias que funcionen a traves de reglas claras que fomenten la meritocracia y que para que esta exista deben forzosamente existir criterios claros y definidos de como ponderar la productividad de la investigacion y docencia. Evidentemente, el establecimiento de estos criterios es fundamental a la hora de las evaluaciones. El escenario continental ofrece enormes variaciones en los ambitos minimamente necesarios para la institucionalizacion de la disciplina. En algunos paises ni siquiera se puede conseguir un titulo de pre o postgrado en ciencia politica. En otros, existe menos de una decena de doctores en ciencia politica trabajando en el ambito universitario. La imperiosa necesidad de la profesionalizacion continua siendo un tema importante a considerar.

Re-election and political career paths in the Uruguayan Congress, 1985–99

Given the presumed marginal – or at best the ‘rubber-stamp legitimising’ – character of Latin American legislatures, they ‘have escaped careful scrutiny’. Even in cases where legislatures are supposed to play a much more significant role than the continental average, such as Chile, Costa Rica and Uruguay, knowledge of legislative politics is still far from conclusive. This article studies re-election patterns of legislators in Uruguay during the four post-authoritarian elections. During these elections in Uruguay, we observed a decreasing but still high rate of turnover of legislators. These high rates of legislative turnover are affected by a significant number of legislators who do not seek re-election. While inter-party electoral volatility strongly influences the rates of incumbent re-election, intra-party volatility does not seem to have an impact on this phenomenon. Lastly, the closed and blocked lists in conjunction with the Uruguayan multiple simultaneous vote, and the fact that a legislator belongs to the Senate, are additional institutional features that help to explain the turnover and incumbent re-election in the legislature.

Partidos y sistemas de partidos en América Latina: Aproximaciones desde la encuesta a expertos 2009

This research note presents a classification of Latin American parties and party systems, according to mainstream ideological currents and country-specific competitive patterns. This classification is based on a preliminary analysis of the results of an expert survey on Latin American party systems that was carried out from 2007 to 2009. We factor-analyze parties’ positions on a wide set of issues and estimate three (latent) ideological dimensions: statism, conservatism (moral, religious, nationalist), and attitudes towards democracy. On the basis of these three ideological dimensions we perform a cluster analysis and classify the political parties of the region in ten “ideological families”.

From Fukuoka to Santiago: Institutionalization of Political Science in Latin America

This article helps fill the void in U.S. political sciences approach to Latin American political science and its institutionalization. One example of that void is that PS: Political Science & Politics has recently published several pieces on the state of the discipline in diverse regions of the world but, despite its relative importance, none on the state of the discipline in Latin America (see, for example, Bogac and Turan 2004; Rizayev 2004; and Sharapova 2005). This omission is remarkable because this continent has both nourished U.S. political science by providing several outstanding colleagues, many of whom have generated controversial and important arguments against the dominant paradigms in the discipline, and because, for better or worse, Latin America has been considered the “backyard” of the United States. Arguably, because of its economic, social, and political ties with the U.S., any major change in Latin America would have greater and more immediate implications for the U.S. than similar events elsewhere in the world. These topics are particularly pertinent with the upcoming conference of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) being held in Santiago, Chile, in 2009, and the APSAs new efforts to recruit members from overseas, especially from not-so privileged countries.

Bringing direct democracy back in: toward a three-dimensional measure of democracy

Most procedural definitions and measurements of democracy are missing one crucial component: direct popular decision-making. This is an important gap that does not allow users of data to ascertain some important variation among democracies. Thus, I propose a new measure that is strongly anchored in a procedural definition of democracy but includes this missing dimension. The proposed measure is well rooted in the literature and introduces a dimension whereby citizens may become the masters of their political fate at any time and without the consent of elected authorities, while avoiding the inclusion of extraneous attributes that are not highlighted in democratic theory. Tests of the validity of the new indicator, using Latin American cases, show that there is enough room for its inclusion without the typical collinearity problems this literature faces. This indicator is not only sound, but it is empirically appealing as it performs better than others when testing relevant hypotheses.

V-Dem Codebook V6

All variables that V-Dem is compiling are included in the Codebook.